doodledee

I was riding in an elevator today and my mind was wondering and I was looking down at all the buttons and the lights and all that stuff. There were like 25 different buttons. Seemed like a lot. It was mostly due to the fact that I was in a tallish building at the time, but there were also quite a few 'miscellaneous' type buttons. One said 'bell'. I assumed it rang a bell. I didn't push it.

Fascinating.

As expected, next to each button was a little metal label showing the floor number that to which you would be magically lifted if you were to push the neighboring button. In addition to the printed number itself, the labels had the [again, expected] brail translation so that [presumably] blind people would be able to work weekends, too.

That got me wondering. With all those buttons, are blind people really able to get into an elevator and fumble around the instrument panel and not accidentally push a bunch of incorrect floors? I tried closing my eyes and finding the button for "4", but then I remembered I don't know how to read brail, so I pretty much gave up right away. From that experiment I concluded that yes, a blind person would most definitely hit a bunch of extra buttons while trying to locate the one for their floor.

Then that got me wondering. Would a blind person even notice if they were riding in an elevator with Gerry when he decided to break out one of his patented "push every button right before he gets off oh-my-god-it's-so-funny-i'm-gonna-pee-my-pants" tricks. ("Classic!" - Star Tribune)

Part of me thinks they wouldn't know what happened, but a bigger part of me hopes they'd beat him with their cane.